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So I woke up on the couch at about 4:30 am this morning with a half eaten box of cheddar bunnies in my arms and a sip of red wine left in my glass. It was one of “those” kind of nights. I was on day 5 of being solo with the kids and maybe it was the lack of adult interaction that triggered me to drink an entire bottle of wine by myself or could have been because I had been puked on, pooped on and smothered in snot all day! Either way, there I was into glass #2 and I needed something to go with it. Since we don’t keep any snacks in the house for anyone over the age of 6 and, thanks to my latest clean eating craze, there was nothing in the cabinets that didn’t take more than 30 minutes and a blender to assemble, to the kids' snack drawer I went!! My wild Saturday night on the couch in my stretchy pants gave inspiration for today’s post.

Just because you no longer have time to put together a proper charcuterie board, you don’t have to lose the essence of class! Fellow mother, and Certified Specialist of Wine, Elizabeth Slack worked with Parent Proof to expertly pair real life scenarios with your children’s snacks and the best wine. You’re welcome!!

"When my dragons are grown, we will take back what was stolen from me and destroy those who wronged me! We will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground!"

Daenerys Targaryen: POSITIVE PARENTING

If you are like Daenerys, you can look past your child's scaly skin and dragon breath and still see a future of wonderful possibilities. You strive to focus on how they can grow their abilities instead of dwelling on the things or people they have mistakenly set on fire. Positive parenting is about supporting children via guiding, mapping out, and brainstorming . . . with an eye on world domination.

"Everyone who isn't us is an enemy"

Cersei Lannister: EXTREME ATTACHMENT PARENTING

While there can be healthy attachment parenting relationships, Cersei Lannister takes it to the extreme. In her approach, the parent is more attached to their children than the children are to their parent, and yearns for them to respond to the parent's emotional needs over their own. This unhealthy dynamic is often demonstrated when the parent keeps the child up past a reasonable bedtime or forces the child to serve as the parent's puppet regent on the Iron Throne. If you find yourself identifying with Cersei's parenting style in any way, place your baby in a box and leave him outside the nearest grocery store. We will all be safer for it.

The opposite of attachment parenting, detachment parenting places sole focus on the parents' goals and achievements. Children are simply a means to carry on your family name until you can find a way to attain immortality. While your kids may spend their childhoods trying to win your love, you will pay the ultimate price in the form of therapy bills or being disemboweled by a cross-bow, so you may want to reconsider this approach before it's too late.

"Winter is coming."

Ned Stark: UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING

The King of the North was a model unconditional parent and showed his children and his bastard unyielding love and compassion. You believe your children can actually become people who can do good in the world and you are supportive of their interests no matter what they are and how they differ from your own. This approach can result in strong-willed and independent children, but it can also result in your beheading.

"I will not be a page in someone else's history book."

Stannis Baratheon: CONDITIONAL PARENTING

The conditional parent is all about loving his/her child when it's convenient and or makes them look like they have a soul. In short, this parenting style says "I love you, but if I even FEEL like I'm not going to get my promotion at work, I will END you as a sacrifice to whatever gods we're believing in this week." Advice for children of these parents--hide the matches.

"If you acquire a reputation as a mad dog, you'll be treated as a mad dog."

Roose Bolton: SLOW PARENTING

Slow parenting allows the child's talents to evolve over time and teaches them to approach life as a journey instead of a destination. "Slow" in this case refers to living in the moment as opposed to looking into the future or seeing things as results oriented. Children of these parents tend to be adventurous and free-spirited. Lord Bolton probably thought it was a sign of "creative thinking" when his bastard Ramsay killed the family raven at age 5 and painted the castle walls with its blood. Slow-parented kids do not feel the pressure to bend to societal norms because their parents have allowed them to evolve into the special, sociopathic snowflakes they were always meant to be, fostering their homicidal tendencies and embracing their lack of empathy or concern for human life with unwavering support and love.

Night's King: SPIRITUAL/HOLISTIC PARENTING

The spiritual/holistic parent is focused on appreciating that which IS and being connected to everything in the NOW. The Night's King believes in family, and he raises every frozen and deceased member of his clan and organizes them into a united front. His long, cold stares and a powerful work ethic motivated by a hunger for the flesh of the living inspires his spawn to march towards the unknown as a strong family unit.

Good news for moderate parental negligence—a study soon to be published in the Journal of Children and Media found that watching the PBS Kids cartoon Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood may help preschoolers develop social and emotional skills. For those of you who have not yet been inducted into the Daniel Tiger cult, each episode deals with a common issue for toddlers and preschool-age kids—fear of starting school, separation anxiety, a new baby, sharing, resolving conflict with peers, etc. There is always a catchy “strategy song” that reinforces the message after the show ends. One of my son’s favorite episodes is “Daniel Visits School,” and I sing the strategy song fairly often to remind myself that he’s the kind of kid that needs extra reassurance during transitions: When we do something new, let’s talk about what we’ll do. C is also obsessed with all of the episodes that feature Daniel’s baby sister Margaret, which is just about enough to make my heart completely explode with love and forgive him for all of his general ass-hattery.

Given Daniel Tiger’s proven success at imparting macro-level life lessons about kindness, empathy, and managing negative feelings, I figure the show’s writers might be equally effective at helping us parents handle some of the more micro challenges of daily life with toddlers. To that end, I have created a list and summaries of suggested episodes I would like to see produced in the near-future:

Episode 501: Daniel Leaves His Shoes on in the Car

Daniel is riding in the car to the grocery store! He is going to leave his shoes on for the entire ride to the store and the entire ride home because he understands that even though it’s only June, it’s already 98 degrees outside, and the last thing Mommy Tiger needs is to be crawling around the back seat of her black station wagon trying to find his forty-dollar Sperrys. Daniel is also going to stop unbuckling his chest clip repeatedly and dumping the entire bag of Goldfish crackers he insisted on holding into his lap.

Strategy Song: No matter how itchy the infinitesimally microscopic piece of sand on your toe is, you still have to leave your shoes on.

Everyone loves Bruno Mars! Golden Oldies are great for dancing! But seriously Daniel, there is an entire universe of musical genres yet to be explored, and if Daddy Tiger tries to hit the high note in “Whimoweh” one more time, Mommy Tiger is going to file for divorce.

Strategy Song: What About Beyoncé? Everyone Loves Beyoncé. Even Taylor Swift is fine, whatever, anything but the Bieber.

Episode 503: Daniel Displays a Little Bit of Flexibility When We’re Out of Cream Cheese

The Tiger family is enjoying Saturday breakfast together! Daniel is having his customary morning meal of half of a whole wheat bagel, cut into quarters and prepared to “medium” heat, meaning Mommy Tiger toasts it to a golden brown and then puts it in the freezer for 45 seconds, no more, no less, to achieve ideal temperature. Oh no, looks like someone forgot to put cream cheese on the grocery list! No worries, Daniel is not going to start shrieking like he’s fallen into a quicksand pit made of yellow jackets, instead he listens calmly as his parents explain that they will go to the store later, and for now he can have peanut butter on his bagel instead. Or he can have a waffle. Or cereal. Or pickles and olives. The world is your fucking oyster, Daniel, just please stop screaming before the neighbors call the police.

Strategy Song: Life is full if disappointment, but that’s not an excuse to act like a turd.

Episode 504: Daniel Wears His Pull-Up Diaper All Night Long

My how Daniel has grown! He is so independent, and he loves to help Mommy Tiger out with Baby Margaret. Daniel has been fully potty trained for awhile, but he still has to wear his pull-up at night, because accidents can happen when you are sleeping. Accidents that result in lots of extra laundry for Mommy Tiger, who already spends about 95% of her waking hours doing laundry. Mommy Tiger didn’t graduate from law school just so she could dedicate her life to folding underwear! Daniel helps minimize the amount of laundry Mommy Tiger has to do by keeping his pull-up on all night long, even if he wakes up at 3:30am and decides that it’s scratchy.

Strategy Song: Keep your pee in your pull-up and not soaking through your $80 organic sheet set from Pottery Barn.

It’s been a long week for Mommy Tiger! While Daddy Tiger is away on business, sleeping in dark hotel rooms and conversing in full sentences with other adults, Mommy Tiger has been trying to sleep-train Baby Margaret while also dealing with Daniel’s latest nap regression. Uh-oh, Daniel has something in his eye…or is that pink eye? Time for a trip to urgent care during rush hour! In order to prevent Mommy Tiger from becoming a full-blown alcoholic, Daniel and Baby Margaret decide that rather than express their feelings about this stressful event through tandem sobbing, they are both going to go to bed without protest and sleep 11 hours through the night.

Strategy Song: When the baby is crying, instead of crying too, why don’t you do something useful like open Mommy a bottle of wine.

How about you? What episodes of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood would you like to have custom-tailored to your particular parenting dilemmas? I hear PBS is struggling with the recent decreases in federal funding, so perhaps they could turn made-to-order TV shows into a new revenue stream. You’re welcome, Big Bird!

Okay so technically it wasn’t Dave Grohl’s fault that I had my son at 36 weeks, but I do believe that because my husband went out of town to see the Foo Fighters, my son decided it would be an ideal time to arrive.

I was just over 3 weeks from my due date. I hadn’t even had my first pointless cervical check yet. You know, the appointment when they tell you how much you’re dilated or effaced resulting in you walking away feeling like your baby could crown at any minute or that it will take another year and vice grips to get the kid out. While the doctor will explain that these checks are good for them to see if you are “progressing”, they are no indicator of when you may go into labor as everyone’s body labors in a magically unique way. Pretty sure these appointments are just so your doctor can start billing your insurance company for something more than a pee test and you can be distracted from the agonizingly slow pace of the last few weeks. Anyway, I never made it to mine this round.

As was my ritual, I got up around 1:00am to pee and rearrange my sea of pillows. I climbed back into bed and could not get comfortable or settled. I was having some mild Braxton Hicks contractions which had riddled my third trimester and were definitely doing their best to interrupt my night. When my husband got home around 3:30am I was sitting upright in bed, the shadow of fear quickly crossing his face. I explained that all was fine, I was just uncomfortable and couldn’t get back to sleep. Before going to sleep, my husband encouraged me to actually start timing the Braxton Hicks contractions. “Oh, interesting idea.” I wasn’t in any pain so I really thought this was a pregnancy insomnia/Braxton Hicks party.

Around 5am, I felt something wet and decided it warranted getting out of bed to check it out. When I went to the bathroom I saw that it was, hold your gag, a dark, bloody discharge. Literally, red alert!! Now THIS seemed like business. I woke my husband up. He immediately asked if I was still having any contractions and how far apart they were. “Oh yeah those, so I got bored with timing them . . .” (husband eye roll). Once we started timing them, I realized they were about 3 minutes apart. Now comes the big decision. Our 2-year-old is asleep and daycare doesn’t open until 7am. Do we wake her and take her to the hospital with us for what I am still believing is false labor, or do we let her sleep and hang out at the house until a bigger sign . . . like the baby crowning? We finally decide to wake her and load her up to head to the hospital. The moment we pull into the parking lot all belly activities had ceased completely. Since I did have a little blood I felt like it was still worth getting checked out, but now I felt just silly.

After asking me a litany of questions, the night shift nurse smugly said, “yeah, you’re not in labor.” I put on my sweetest bite-me smile and replied, “that’s fine, we just want to make sure everything is okay.” As we waited for shift-change, I started to get annoyed with myself that we were even there. I wasn’t having anything even close to a BH contraction anymore. Our new day-shift nurse came in to check me and make sure nothing else was going on, and low and behold, I was 5 cm dilated!! She said we were definitely in labor and it looked like we were going to have a Wimpy White Boy on our hands. Huh? What did you just call my unborn child? So this is a thing. Pre-term, Caucasian males are often referred to as having Wimpy White Boy Syndrome because they tend to do the worst when born prematurely. Thanks lady for making me feel horrible about something that I have no control over AND hasn’t even happened yet. So far this hospital has no stars for the bedside manner of its nurses. Now that we were pretty confident it was go-time, we had family pick up our toddler and take her to daycare. By now we’d been there for almost 2 hours and my doctor was due any minute for a first check-in. The contractions had ramped back up and had a kick of pain with them now. Nothing unbearable, but enough to feel legit. At my doctor’s check just after 8:00, I was at 7 cm. For the next hour, my contractions kicked it up a notch and started feeling like just one long drop-kick to the gut. As they were getting more and more intense, I saw the anxiety on my husband’s face ignite and he kept asking me if I felt like I needed to push. I definitely wasn’t ready to push but felt that the ball would drop any second. We went ahead and asked the nurse to page my doctor.

The nurse slowly readied the room for the impending mess by rolling in the mop buckets and hanging up the hazmat suits. My husband told her that she would want to hurry as this would go pretty quickly, to which she responded with a sigh and an eye roll that clearly said “you’re an idiot.” With the annoyance still hovering in the air, my doctor came in to give me the old five finger check. I was fully dilated but my waters hadn’t broken yet. I was feeling the intense pressure that can only be created by a watermelon trying to burst through a lemon and so I gave her the wink to go ahead and strip those membranes. The party was officially kicked off at 9:00am. I started to push and was quickly reacquainted with a pain that can be felt from the toes to the earlobes! I looked at my husband and said “man this really hurts.” When I felt the ring of fire (that I had somehow missed with baby #1), I re-committed to myself that this would be the last of the Thacker offspring. I pushed for what I felt like must have been an hour. My son was born at 9:14 am. I now know that I can endure less than 15 minutes of pain. Hats off to the ladies who go on for days on end. To my relief, he weighed 6 lbs 6 oz and looked pink and healthy! Stay tuned for a follow-up post on our stint in the NICU and going home without baby.

I had the hardest time envisioning what having a second baby would be like. All I could see was my daughter AND I couldn’t imagine loving anything more or even equally, but the second baby is easier to fall in love with instantly. I could never relate to those first-time moms who claimed to immediately fall in love with this alien that they just spat out! Nothing could have been more foreign to me when I had my daughter. The first hours after having her were filled with me constantly checking that she had all her parts and my mind being blown that those parts grew in the same vessel that had previously done nothing more than process waffle fries and squeeze cheese in college. With baby #2 you’ve already been trained by #1 so you know how precious those first moments are and how much you are going to love them. I was not only in love with my little man immediately, but I also knew he completed our family. Mostly because I didn’t ever want to push another kid out of my body, but also because he was so darn adorable.

By the time your baby reaches 6 months, you deserve a lot of awards. #1 you did not let a new season of OITNB completely distract you from their basic needs, #2 you have given your youth and many sleeping hours over to someone who will never thank you and #3 you have completely stopped judging other parents and instead now offer your condolences.

Hitting the 6-month mark also means that your little liquid dieter is ready for the real stuff. This time can be tons of fun as you experiment with different baby food recipes and make pureed versions of everything you can think of; however, it is also the beginning of a whole new set of concerns. Now they can eat food, but you start to realize that most of the stuff on your grocer’s shelves is just pretending to be food and you will spend the majority of your time trying to dodge the hormone filled wasteland of what is considered “normal”. Between dealing with a daycare system that serves juice as a “fruit” to every holiday being driven by candy filled surprises and over indulgent eating, it’s an uphill battle to teach our children to eat well and be mindful of what food does to their bodies.

Raising your kids to eat healthy is almost as hard as raising them not to hate you in their teens. From school events to neighborhood parties, it seems like the entire goal of these gatherings are to get your kids to consume as many sugary treats as possible. Navigating holiday and birthday parties can start to look like an episode of “Breaking Bad”. At every corner, someone is trying to get you or your kids hooked on the white stuff---sugar that is :).

While I want to applaud those parents who spend hours recreating their entire Pinterest board, complete with cupcakes that look like an emotionally challenged, Frozen Ice Queen, I’d prefer to avoid having my children mainline corn syrup and blue dye. Uppers aren’t our thing. Let me be clear, I am in this for the short game. I know the long-term effects of pumping hormones and chemicals into your body, but my main concern is that right now that crap literally turns my kid into something out of The Exorcist. Head spinning and all. Not to mention the promise of a belly ache and a slew of poop problems to clean up.

Unless you plan on keeping your kids locked away, they are going to run into the occasional Dorito and/or Twinkie. Before you go hosing yourself in patchouli and start calling gluten-consumers racists, here are some suggestions on how you can survive the Sugar Raves {aka kids' parties}:

Feed them before you head out AND prep a fun, not full of crap, treat (check these out) that can be use as incentive for later. This is by far the easiest plan of attack. Tell the kids they’ve already eaten and will get the treat you made earlier when they get home.

Don’t be afraid to dismantle the buffet table to make your kids a plate that isn’t toxic. Pull apart those sandwiches, wipe icing off of muffins, pick m&m’s out of the trail mix. You can piece together a decent protein, vegetable and fruit from almost any smorgasbord.

Ask the host when they will be eating and opening gifts; shoot to be there for gifts and skirt around meal time. Your kids will be too distracted by jealousy and trying to steal the bday kid’s gifts to look at the chemical filled "treats" on the table;

Tell your child they are allergic to cupcakes and if they eat them, then they will break out in a full-body rash and Santa won’t bring them any presents;

Call the host when accepting the invite and give them a long list of things your children cannot eat. MAGIC! Your kids will never be invited back to another party. You can only hope that word spreads like wildfire.

Bring your own food and replace all of the "hosted" dishes with nutritious food that is sure to bore the other guests to death.

Set up a mini picket line with your kids around the buffet table. Have little Susie and Jim hold posters that say things like "These cookies cause cancer", "Just Say No to Cheetos" or "Pastries make you Poop". This method will both educate other party goers and help your children learn that the truth can make them unpopular.

In all seriousness, it’s hard enough to try to teach our kids to be mindful about the foods they are putting in their bodies without every kids’ party and event being riddled with junk food. Help us all out and be the parent that brings the paleo cookies to the bake sale.

It wasn’t supposed to happen to me. Second babies are never overdue, I thought, and I was pretty sure I read somewhere that most women have all of their kids around the same point of gestation. My son’s labor began at 38 weeks and 3 days, and so while my daughter’s due date was December 25, I informed anyone who asked that she would most likely be home in time for Christmas. But the holidays came and went, and as I stared down the final days of the year, my Google history filled with increasingly desperate searches:

how to induce labor

do late babies sleep better?

has anyone ever been pregnant forever???

The weekly emails and updates from my pregnancy apps stopped comparing my fetus to a fruit and started questioning my sanity. “Are you sure you’re really pregnant?” They asked gently. “Maybe you should see someone.” Strangers no longer smiled warmly when they saw me waddling down the sidewalk and instead crossed the street like I might have some infectious disease. My phone lit up with calls from the bravest among my family members, gleefully posing the dreaded question:

Have you had that baby yet?

Medical induction wasn’t an option for me, so I turned to the Old Wives for their recommendations. Black cohash sounded sinister, like something an ancient Greek philosopher would use to poison his rival. Evening primrose oil required more flexibility than I possessed at 10 months pregnant. Castor oil had the most promising data behind it, but I was not quite prepared to poop myself into labor. I drank red raspberry leaf tea and walked for an hour every morning, which did succeed in getting the baby into the entryway, but did nothing about opening the door.

“Anything you recommend?” I asked my doctor at my 57-week appointment, after she informed me that if it was possible to be negative-dilated, I was.

“There is one thing,” she said.

I reconsidered the castor oil.

New Year’s Eve came and went. One evening, while hauling my substantial bulk off of the yoga ball and lowering myself into a forward-leaning inversion, I turned to my husband and said, “I think we’re going to have to try.” He looked like a third-string quarterback that had just been called in for the final play against Alabama. A squirrel that fell into the lion cage. The young squire thrown into battle. For God and country, we were going to get this baby out.

“I think I have a headache,” he said.

The Saturday night before the Monday of my scheduled repeat C-section, I gave up. My husband and I stayed up late talking, mourning the lost chance of a spontaneous labor and a VBAC, pointing out all of the benefits of a scheduled birth. At least we would be well rested. We went to sleep at midnight, at peace with the way things were going to be.

Labor began at 3am.

My baby girl was born 26 hours later, at 41 weeks and 4 days—just a few days shy of forever.

First I’d like to thank Alice and Kathleen for letting me crash their blog for a post. I've known them both since I became a mom 8 (gasp! This is going by fast!) years ago. They were busy working with my husband and keeping him sane while I was busy at home figuring out how a human so small could change your life so much. Alice was one of Aila’s first babysitters when she was 3 months old and her choice of activity to keep the infant entertained was to take her to a puppet show. You gotta start them early. Or I think Alice just really wanted to see Winnie the Pooh.

I’ve been brought in to discuss my “jet-setting lifestyle,” which sounds much more glamorous than it really is and is even less glamorous with children. But I guess when I think about it, we really do travel all the time and everywhere with our kids (now 8 and 6) and never think twice about it. In addition to vacations, we now live in Toronto, and our family is spread out all over the US. Two hours on a plane, nine hours in a car, who cares? Let’s go! People tell me we are crazy or are amazed that we do it, but I just figured it was normal because that’s what we’ve always done. I think that is my first tip in kid travel: do it early and often and you will grow numb to how bonkers it can be.

A wise friend once told me that babies are like living luggage and you can take then anywhere. I believed him and did just that. The biggest issue with infant travel is only the amount of crap that you need to bring with you. The smaller the person, the more shit they require to survive away from home base. But other than the 4 extra bags you’ll have to pack (and carry somehow—but that’s what husbands are for), babies mostly sleep and eat while you enjoy a nice glass of wine on vacation. My daughter had taken 14 round-trip flights all over the US and gone to Europe before she turned 2...all while still flying free as an “infant in arms” (thankfully, since diapers are stupid expensive).

But eventually they grow up and become mini-people with opinions and ideas and legs that run and mouths that need way more than breastmilk and Cheerios. And while their travel bags get lighter, the drama can weigh you down 10 times more if you allow it. Just remember two things: 1) You're the boss, and 2) “We’re gonna have so much fucking fun we’re gonna need plastic surgery to remove our goddamn smiles!” (Use the film “Vacation” to measure your family traveling success and you will always come out on top).

So here are some Dos and Don’ts I’ve learned from traveling with bigger kids:

DO feed them until they’re happy. Lovingly prepared, organic, well-balanced meals on a firm schedule are crap when on the road. Every time they say “Mom, I’m hungry!” it’s way easier to hand over a bag of Goldfish than to explain it isn’t snack time for another hour...and then listen to them whine for that hour. They can go right back to sprouted bread and kale when you arrive at your destination. But make sure not to jack them up on sugary crap either. Remember, you are about to spend a significant amount of time in a confined space with these small people. And always pack three times as much food as you think they could possibly eat. I swear, moving vehicles make their stomachs expand exponentially.

DON’T stress too much about your fellow passengers on a plane. While I believe it’s important to explain to a child that kicking the seat in front of them is an asshole thing to do, you are also never going to see these people again. Their ice cold glares have got nothing on your mama bear growl, and if they can’t see how cute your little monsters really are then screw 'em.

DO be “that parent” who hands over the electronics as soon as you are settled and orders a glass of wine. You have years to be the mom who plays games at home and sings cute songs to keep your precious angels occupied and their minds educationally stimulated. When traveling, iPads, DVD players, phones, etc. are worth their silent weight in gold. Period.

DON’T expect to arrive when the GPS says you will. There will be potty breaks and food stops whether your “we are gonna drive straight through” husband likes it or not.

DO make everyone use the bathroom on these stops, including your aforementioned husband.

DON’T throw away those empty water bottles because inevitably one child will still have to go to the bathroom again 10 minutes after you just stopped.

DON’T accidentally drink from that water bottle.

DO stretch before the trip. This will aid in nimbly climbing into the back of the car at 75mph to retrieve whatever can’t wait until the next stop.

DON’T let them see you sweat. If Mom loses it then they all will.

DO have a sense of humour. While you know “you'll look back at this someday and laugh,” why not just laugh now. I find it truly the only way to survive. And when things seem like they can’t get any worse—one kid is puking while the other peed his pants again and there is a 3 hour delay or a 10 mile backup—just remember, your neighbors are sitting home this weekend doing nothing while you are out exploring the world and making memories. Crazy memories, but memories none the less.

I’m writing today to tell you it’s over. I just can’t do this anymore.

I’ll admit it. When we were first introduced, I didn’t think I would need you. Your shapeless shirts and enormous elastic waists were unattractive and borderline offensive. I wasn’t going to “buy in” to the hyped up, overpriced maternity clothing market. Tunic tops and black leggings are accepted as public attire and so I completely discounted everything you were bringing to the table. How wrong I was . . .

As I, quite literally, grew into you, something changed. I began to appreciate your full coverage of my ever-more-protruding outie belly button and your flexibility when my ass decided it wanted some cushion for the load. You were there for me when my thighs started to touch, offering expanding leg room and minimal chaffing. Never judging, never bursting at the seams, you held me together, and for that I’ll be forever grateful.

Now I’m not supposed to need you anymore. People are saying it’s time to move on. My husband is sick of seeing me wear belly-bands. But the more people are trying to tear us apart, the more I want you. Every time I zip a zipper or button a button, I think of you. That special way you offer the appearance of real clothes with the comfort of stretchy pants is unparalleled. During my pregnancy, your clever rouse helped me hide the bulging lumpiness, and later you artfully disguised my postpartum F.U.P.A.

While my body has begun shrinking, my love for you continues to grow. Who invented clothes with true waist lines? Why did the baby doll dress ever go out of style for women in their mid-30s? It is apparent that not enough people have spent consecutive weeks in pajama pants on the couch. It’s fucking awesome and makes you question why you ever wore real pants or showered daily in the first place. All pants should come with stretchy waists or tummy taming elastic that can be pulled up to just under your boobs, supporting not one, but two baby bomb sites.

So that we’re clear—it’s not you, it’s me. You are amazing and have been nothing but wonderful to me. I was really able to be myself when I had belly and lower back support. I only wish we had met sooner and under different circumstances. If I had known how much joy you would bring to my life, I would have worn you to every tailgate and college party I attended. Please understand that if I don’t end this obsession now, I will be knocking on the door of retirement in a belly band and empire waste sweater.

If you could see past the Trojan horse that is pregnancy and labor and did any amount of reading on what happens after the OB spotlights fade, you know that tummy deflation and the regroup of body parts is far creepier than anything having to do with carrying or expelling a fetus. Think of your vagina as a dam. When the dam bursts, the reservoir fills but water continues to flow through the broken walls bringing with it, the trees, fish and small boats that washed up along the way. Note, that some of these items are so far "up river" that they won't even make the appearance until weeks after it bursts. If you've gotten lost here; A BUNCH OF JUNK COMES OUT OF YOUR VAGINA AND OTHER WEIRD SHIT HAPPENS TO YOUR BODY FOR A GOOD WHILE AFTER THAT BUNDLE OF JOY MAKES THEIR APPEARANCE!!!

Let’s start from the beginning. You’ve welcomed your sweet, bluish offspring into the world and while you are awestruck and trying to convince yourself that a human just came out of your body, you are forced to push something else out. The placenta! That magical, life sustaining organ that resembles a blood filled jellyfish. It’s worth getting your doctor to let you have a good look at this thing as it, hopefully, is the only time you’ll get to look at one of your organs on the outside of your body while conscious. Take advantage. Check that horror show off your list and let’s move on to the next Discovery Channel experience.

You’ve no doubt heard of lochia. Otherwise known as YUCK! This mass of blood, mucus and uterine tissue will unexpectedly gush out of you from time to time postpartum. The biggest gushes hit when you are nursing or when that girl you never really liked from high school swings by to say hello and check to see if you’ve lost your baby weight. Luckily, the hospital or your midwife will equip you with pads the size of a life jacket. When you first see them you can never imagine actually utilizing their full capacity of Lake Michigan level absorbency, but you will. Cramps are a sweet warning signal that will let you know the flood gates are opening.

While one orifice is free flowing, another is setting up a barricade. The stool softeners they give you in the hospital are not a suggestion and you will need to make sure you are fully stocked when you return home to get you through the next few weeks. This is where Amazon Prime pays for itself in spades. You are saved from having to endure the shifty eyes of the cashier at check out and you can get relief in 48 hours without having to leave the comfort of your donut pillow. If you’re not up for the pills, there’s some great tea, Smooth Move, that really delivers ;)

Next up!! Night sweats. If you’ve never had the pleasure of sweating profusely without any exertion, get ready for the good times. These usually hit a week or so postpartum when your hormones decide to jump ship without a care for the havoc that will be wrecked on your body. Night sweats yield bed wetting level moisture so best to prepare your spouse and the rubber sheets. The hormone rampage doesn’t stop there. Did you enjoy the full mane that pregnancy provided? Along with your sex drive, so goes your hair. This side effect sneaks up on you just when you feel like life is getting back to normal and you’ve planned a girls’ night out. You take a look in the mirror when getting ready and realize that you have a bald spot that will require a Trump level comb over to disguise.

With the hormone party that hits postpartum, it’s a wonder that schools feel the need to teach kids sex education at all. Your really just need to tell teenage girls that they will lose their hair and their stomachs will look like their great grandmother’s if they get pregnant and tell boys that unprotected sex puts them at risk of not having sex again for at least another year, two if the baby never sleeps.

As Parent Proof’s tens of loyal readers may recall from my riveting birth story, my first child was born via emergency C-section due to extreme decelerations of his heart rate during a slow-to-progress labor. After I was stitched up and stapled shut and drugged out and returned to my postpartum room to groggily process the both prolonged and sudden arrival of my son, I had two successive thoughts: 1) What the F just happened? And, 2) I’m pretty sure I never want to do that again.

So began my journey to the birth of my second child via VBAC, which stands for “vaginal birth after Cesarian.” VBAC is one of the many topics that has swung on the pendulum of pregnancy advice from one extreme to the other and back again over the past three decades, and thus the mere mention of a VBAC gives total strangers the right to maintain very strong opinions about your uterus.

The primary controversy surrounding a VBAC is that it carries a small risk (about 1% according to the NIH) (and here is the actual NIH publication in case you are super thorough like that) that the uterus will tear along the previous C-section scar during labor or delivery, putting the mother at risk for serious blood loss and the baby at risk for heading out the wrong exit and suffering from oxygen deprivation and even death (risk of death is <0.5%). It all sounds pretty cataclysmic, thus raising the question as to why any woman would bother just for the sake of a vaginal birth that will probably result in a lifetime of peeing herself a little bit every time she sneezes. It turns out that a pregnant woman has at least a 1% chance of encountering any serious complication associated with childbirth. Having a baby is a dangerous business, but a catastrophic uterine tear that results in harm to the baby is one of the least likely selections in the grab-bag of scary shit that can go wrong. Major complications during a planned repeat C-section are also rare, and in my opinion, a woman should have a VBAC if she wants one, and she should have a repeat C-section if she wants one, and the Shrill Harpies of the Internet should keep the focus on their own vaginas and worry less about everyone else’s.

The NIH data on VBACs cited above is relatively new, and the medical profession is second only to the Republican party in the speed with which it adapts to updated scientific information, thus for those of us who want a VBAC, it can still be a bit of an uphill battle. I did my research and studied all of the advice Google had to offer, yet in the end I basically did everything wrong and managed to have a successful VBAC anyway. Just in case someone else out there is interested in having a VBAC but is also too lazy to be truly proactive about it, I thought I would share all of the ways you can screw things up and still end up pushing a baby out of your vagina like you’ve always dreamed.

Tips for Having a VBAC that I Totally Ignored And Still Had a VBAC

Find a Supportive Healthcare Provider: I was at my 6-week postpartum appointment after my C-section when I first mentioned to my OB that I might want to try for a VBAC if I ever got pregnant again. Her initial response was: “There’s no easy way to get a baby out. You either ruin your vagina or you ruin your belly, and you’ve already ruined your belly.” I’m surprised they don’t have that embroidered on a pillow in the waiting room. Given the internet’s absolute insistence that I find a pro-VBAC provider regardless of whether that person is a physician or a large animal vet, I should probably have spent the early weeks of my second pregnancy interviewing new doctors. However, I felt like my obsession with having a VBAC needed some counter-balance from someone whose primary interest was not so much in fulfilling my notions of maternal empowerment but rather in getting me and my child through humankind’s most arduous natural transition as safely as possible, so I stuck with my OB despite her penchant for describing childbirth like a scene from a George RR Martin series.

Choose a VBAC-Friendly Hospital or Birth Center: The hospital where I delivered both babies (and where my brothers and I were born) has about a 33% C-section rate, so it probably wouldn’t fit ICAN’s criteria for “VBAC-friendly.” However, given my love for in-room food delivery and hydrocodone, there was no way I was having this baby at home, and the most popular midwife group in my area only has privileges at a local medical center known primarily for its willingness to overlook mandatory reporting for gun-shot wounds, so once again I decided to go with the devil I knew.

Hire a Doula: Extreme pain makes me act like a rabid wolverine caught in a bear trap—there is no amount of money I could pay a stranger to put up with that.

Have an Unmedicated Birth: I’m pretty sure I would be divorced and in prison if I had attempted an unmedicated birth. My doctor told me that she strongly preferred that I get the epidural in case I did have a uterine tear and needed to get to surgery immediately, and I was all, "don’t throw me in that briar patch, how soon can I get the needle?" My labors are long and my uterus has a flare for the dramatic—it likes to act like it’s going to expel the baby on the bathroom floor from the first contraction, while my cervix forgets to set its alarm and oversleeps the whole affair by 10 to 12 hours. By the time I get to 4 centimeters, I’m ready for a cocktail, as is everyone else on the L&D floor.

Deliver by Your Due Date: This seemed like a no-brainer. My son was born 9 days early, surely all future babies would follow suit. But my daughter, due on December 25th, did not want to compete with Santa and Jesus for her entire childhood, nor did she feel that she should be in any big hurry just for a single extra tax deduction given the years of being a financial suck she has ahead of her, and so she took her time, arriving on January 4th, a mere 10 days past the VBAC deadline. But it turns out my super medical-model doctor wasn’t a complete head-case about a late-term baby, or maybe she was just moved by my strength and resolve and also by the fact that she was on vacation from Christmas to New Year’s. Whatever the reason, baby girl made her way into the world in her own time, in just the way she was always meant to.

In truth, while neither my OB practice nor hospital are public cheerleaders for VBACs, both ended up being supportive of my birth plan, which made a huge difference once labor had actually started, particularly at the point when I was attempting to book an OR by myself because I was tired of this “contraction” crap.

The only thing I did on my own that I believe made a difference this time around was read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin. I read it twice, once in the first trimester and once in the third, and I even took a few notes. Despite having zero interest in having an orgasmic natural birth on a farm, the book still helped me prepare for the pain of labor and develop a few techniques that allowed me to physically and emotionally relax more than I was able to during my first birth experience. Overall I felt more prepared and less anxious, and I believe that made a huge difference in my body’s ability to do what it needed to do.

In the end, having enjoyed both types of delivery, I can honestly say that my doctor was right: there’s no easy way to have a baby. The C-section was harder in some ways, the VBAC was harder in others, and each gave me a beautiful, healthy child to embarrass with his and her own unique birth story for many years to come. Now excuse me while I go grab a Poise pad before I sneeze.

So it’s been a while since I first wrote about potty training. That’s mostly because we are still in the trenches and the trench is currently getting deeper and longer so forgive me while I waste your time complaining about my problems. I didn’t realize how much worse it could get. We are literally having arguments with an almost 3-year-old about how peeing on the couch is not okay. While I understand that arguing with a child is futile, it happens when you’re losing patience and you start to believe that you can rationalize with them. More and more I realize that toddlers are really just drunk frat boys, Chapter “Sigma Pi Pi”. They pee on your kitchen floor and act confused when you get upset, theyinsist that you reward them for any minor personal hygiene upkeep, they crap their pants at the most inconvenient times possible, and they are adamant that dark liquor must be mixed with coke on game day.

We thought we were off to a pretty average start with our daughter going long stretches without a diaper and showing that she could hold it. But then things took a turn. She would pee all over her chair during lunch or poop in her pants while watching a movie. Now I know that all the books say that this is normal and we should approach these situations calmly and try to defuse any stress, but it is really hard to find Zen when scrubbing feces out of your carpet. So our first plan of attack was to put a reward system in place. I have been adamant about not using food to get her to use the potty. I have an irrational fear that she will one day reward herself for making the JV basketball team with a whole box of Krispy Kremes when that is clearly a treat for someone who worked hard enough to get to Varsity. Anyway, I decided to go with stickers. I bought the really horrible ones that don’t actually stick to anything. They were working great for about a month until she lost interest and decided to resist all things potty. At this point daycare decided to get their skin in the game. They starting doing charts for the kids at school and mandatory potty breaks. Just when I thought we were off to the races, they have some teachers quit and shuffled classrooms. With those adjustments, we were told that they were going to be putting potty training in the class on hold. “Um what?” You don’t open someone up for surgery and then say you would like to take a break while they’re bleeding out!!!!!! After crying in front of the other kids and parents in the class, I pulled myself together and decided we would just forge ahead on our own because nothing makes you feel more like a parent than the constant reminder that you can fail at the simplest of tasks.

I updated our reward system. We were now going to have a tracking chart with fun squares to color and potty prizes (dollar bin). I introduced the chart to D and the concept of prizes and she was immediately successful . . .for about a week. At this point I decide to throw all structure out the window and stop fighting her to use the potty. I put her in pull ups and offer it to her from time to time and she goes occasionally. Long car rides are the worst. “I need to go potty” “Okay honey, thanks for telling me. Can you hold it or do we need to stop?” “No you hold it.” “I can’t hold it. Do you need to go potty now.” “Yeah. Can you hold it?” “Wait what? Okay no. Let me find somewhere to stop.”—We make it into the nastiest gas station bathroom you’ve ever seen and I line the toilet with toilet paper and manage for her not to touch anything—“No I don’t want to sit on the potty!!” “But that’s how you GO potty.” “No, I not!” “You said you needed to go potty so lets just try.” “No I don’t need to go potty.” “Please just sit and try.” “NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! I DON’T NEED TO GO POTTY!!” “Okay fine, but we aren’t stopping again.”—load back in car, get on highway, 3 minutes later—“Mommy, I need to go potty.”Make it stop.

So as it stands today, we just aren’t there yet. You can read this and feel better about your parenting abilities or know that you have a kindred spirit in the land of the forever diapers.

I knew from the very beginning of my first pregnancy I had no interest in natural birth. I vaguely knew it existed and was quite popular in third world countries and scientology communities, but I couldn’t come up with one good reason to consider this option for myself. I had this picture in my head of myself in a hospital gown, calm and collected and smiling, welcoming my firstborn into this world. Subtle makeup, a fresh pedicure and a great blowout. This was a bit odd, considering I’m usually too lazy to wear makeup and I don’t use a blow dryer, but a dream is a dream.

I enjoyed the fantasy until one fateful day I decided to watch A Baby Story. I watched a laboring woman – with an epidural, a working epidural! – cry, scream and yell unkind things including, “Get this thing out of me!” It was one of the most violent things I’ve ever seen. I proceeded to watch another episode realizing, to my horror, that this was not an uncommon scenario. Shaking and terrified, I called my husband to tell him I changed my mind and I’m not ever giving birth.

Since not ever giving birth was not a viable option, I decided to find a way to have a non-horrible birth. I knew there had to be a way, since many women choose to give birth again after having done it once. And while there are many horror birth stories shared, I don’t actually know many women who said they wouldn’t do it all over again. So I started to do the only rational (nerdy) thing I knew to do, educating myself about birth.

I read books, I read blogs, I watched documentaries. I harassed all of the women I knew – and some I didn’t – asking them to share their birth experience. Surprisingly, natural birth began to emerge like the easier, less painful way to go. The more research I did, the more comfortable I felt with the idea of a medication-free birth. My husband was on board and we took childbirth prep classes and baby positioning classes and hired a doula. I no longer felt terrified and felt as prepared as I could reasonably be.

I was a day past my due date with my first child when I woke up early in the morning when my water broke all over the bed. A strong first contraction came just a few moments later. While I showered and tried to get ready contractions were getting stronger, until I had to stop what I was doing and breathe through them. I wasn’t sure what was going on. Is my labor sufficiently far along to be feeling the contractions? Or is this the very beginning of a long labor and this is as easy as it gets? There were a few factors to consider –a history of fast labor in my family, some effacement and dilation and lots of strong Braxton-Hicks for a couple of weeks, and being 30 minutes away from the hospital – that made me decide to go ahead and go to the hospital although my labor was not in a standard 4-1-1 pattern (with both labors, my contractions were never a full minute long nor at regular intervals).

Before I got in the car I had a hard contraction that I couldn’t get through without a moan. I tried to sit in the car and couldn’t – I was having a lot of pain (pressure) in my back. As we would find out later, the baby was OP (occiput posterior), a fetal presentation which can be a cause of back labor, start-and-stop labor patterns, and generally makes it harder for the baby’s head to fit through the mother’s pelvis. I stayed on hands and knees in the car as the labor really picked up. I was loud through contractions and gasping for air.

We got to the hospital and I was taken into a labor and delivery room. The nurse told me she had to check to make sure I was in labor (because screaming at regular intervals was apparently not a reliable indicator). After I reluctantly agreed to a cervical check, she looked at me with surprise and told me I was complete and could push whenever I was ready. It has been less than three hours since the first contraction and I was relieved the worst of it – the transition – was over.

I pushed for a long time; the baby would not descend. Squatting, standing, sitting, hands and knees. My midwife would come in and check and say, “Still at -1 [station]” and leave. She said the baby was definitely posterior; I knew they would be suggesting different interventions next. Our doula was texting my husband, discretely informing him we don’t have to agree to any of them, as the baby is not showing any signs of distress. I was getting exhausted. I waddled to the bathroom and while I was there something changed, somehow the baby was able to rotate. The pushing has become effective. After about three hours of pushing, the baby was out.

She was beautiful; long and red-skinned and dark-haired. It was surreal, the love and joy overwhelming. The surprise and relief it all worked beautifully despite the unexpected.

With our second birth, we switched providers and hospitals and went with a natural-birth-friendly group and a hospital that had a water birth option and a very good low-intervention record. I had some concerns over having a fast labor – with my first labor being around 6 hours, of which three hours were pushing, and the second labor traditionally being faster than the first. I discussed this with my providers and they were not concerned; I agreed to get in the car and drive to the hospital at the first signs of labor. I also discussed my concerns with my doula, who suggested I put some clean towels in the back on my car and read up on emergency childbirth just in case.

I was 37 weeks along when I went into labor. There were no clear signs leading up to it – I had some mild cramping during the day which is not uncommon during the last months of pregnancy. I rested and drank lots of water and took a warm bath to relax. I sent an extensive status update on all of my open projects to my boss (my version of nesting). I finished the current season of Mad Men and tried to sleep, but the cramping kept me up. Then a painful contraction came. I called my husband who was 30 minutes away at an overnight camp to come home quickly. I tried my midwife and couldn’t get her. I called my doula, waking her up. We decided this might be labor and I should be safe and go to the hospital.

I hung up and contractions started hitting me hard. I remember my thoughts racing, Why is this so much more painful than I remember it being the first time? Can I pass out from pain? If I’m unconscious, will my body continue laboring? Can my own screaming damage my eardrums? I was thankful our oldest daughter was staying overnight with her grandparents and wouldn’t need years of therapy to recover from seeing her mother in this state. Judging by the intensity of the contractions I was almost certain I was in transition. I was almost certain I wasn’t going to make it to the hospital.

My husband walked into the house to me screaming. I gasped for a bath and he filled up our tub and helped me get in. I asked for him to pour hot water on my back during contractions and it helped with the pain immensely. Or midwife called back and he put her on speaker. He said we thought I was in transition and we weren’t going to make it to the hospital, which was 40 minutes away. The midwife said we could try and to this day I’m very thankful we didn’t. He hung up and called a friend of ours who is a midwife and told her what was happening and asked her to come. With a huge contraction the bathwater exploded – my water broke. It was an incredible relief.

I didn’t know how far along I was, but by the decrease in contraction intensity I guessed I was through the transition. I didn’t feel an urge to push, and was going to hold off pushing as long as I could, at least until a medical professional could get to us. My contractions – less painful now – kept coming. With the next big contraction the baby shot out of my body.

I turned around and grabbed her and held her to me. She wasn’t crying, but I knew that babies born into water may not cry. We could see she was breathing. She was beautiful and wrinkly and tiny, smaller, than our first. We called 911 and when my husband told the operator his wife just had a baby, the operator said, “Congratulations!” Minutes later an ambulance arrived and three EMTs walked in. They checked mine and the baby’s vitals – all good – clamped and cut the cord and told us we could go to the hospital. My husband and I would later trace the timeline with the phone call log – it was less than an hour from the beginning of labor (first call to my husband) to baby arriving (911 call). I would later google “precipitous labor” and read all the stories to help me process my experience.

I was looking for an easy and comfortable way to bring my children into the world. Instead, my experiences were wild and unpredictable and changed me in profound ways. And I am very thankful.

Most of us are familiar with the joy of a toddler meltdown, but for those of you who have been living under a rock with your pal Ted Cruz, let me enlighten you. A toddler meltdown involves a complete loss of rational communication and motor skills resulting in a screaming, kicking, snotty pile of child. Public arenas are favored for this behavior and the rubber necking of passers by excites the situation. A close cousin to this behavior is the lesser known Daddy Meltdown or “DM”.

The DM is a special creature all its own. Not unlike the toddler meltdown, the DM is irrational and frantic, however, there's typically less kicking (this does not apply to dads from South Dakota). They also occur more frequently in the home than in public and confirms the notion that you never really grow up, you just learn how to act in public. DMs usually have two root causes: #1 he has just realized that he is no longer allowed to be the most immature person in the household #2 there is living proof that his wife is a stronger person and better at everything. Take these two notions together and you've got an adult male who is going to lose all sense of control.

When faced with a full-scale Daddy Meltdown, proceed with caution:

1) Identify yourself in a calm and appeasing tone.

2) Back away slowly, preferably in the direction you came.

3) Walk, don’t run, and keep your eye on the daddy so you can see how it will react.

4) If you are with other people, stand together to present a more intimidating figure, but do not surround the daddy.

5) The use of pepper spray is not recommended as it will only agitate the daddy’s state.

Sometime around 30 weeks pregnant, you begin to look past your varicose veins and foot bloat and realize that sooner or later, somehow and in some way, that angry badger you’re housing in your abdomen is going to have to come out of your body. After you’ve done enough Googling to form a basic understanding of the mechanics of labor and delivery, you will still be left with the most pressing pregnancy question of all—is this random twinge or cramp or feeling labor, or is it gas?

Labor, like everything else that has to do with pregnancy, child-rearing, or being a human, is unique to the person experiencing it. Some women progress through the Signs of Labor check-list with OCD-like precision, while others feel no symptoms until they are doubled-over in the Costco parking lot with a head poking out between their legs. Plus, as I learned the hard way, labor can start and then stop, over and over, for a period of days or even weeks, like you’re under the spell of some comic book villain who plans to take over the world by driving women insane.

Many people will tell you that once you are truly in labor, “you’ll just know.” Those people are assholes. You may not just know, or you may know and be wrong, at least by the strictest definition of active labor. I had a very textbook start to my first labor, which began mid-38 weeks. My son dropped early, and his head was engaged by my 35-week appointment. I had Braxton-Hicks contractions throughout the third trimester, and they dutifully increased in strength, length, and frequency as the final weeks wore on. Back pain and cramps followed suit, and within 12 hours of my (first) trip to the hospital, I peered into the toilet and heard a voice in the back of my head announce in Michael Cain’s accent, “it’s the bloody show!” Then, of course, I proceeded to have the world’s longest labor, with contractions starting and stopping, growing longer and then shorter, for the next 60 hours, until my doctor mercifully faked a cervical check, announced I was sufficiently dilated, and ordered a nurse with a wheelchair to whisk me across the parking deck to the epidural palace.

Despite the individual variations, however, there are still a few signs you can obsess over in your final weeks that may or may not indicate that labor will begin sometime between this afternoon and three weeks from Thursday. As always, if you think you may be in labor, consult your doctor or midwife, and don’t be afraid to be wrong.

Possible Signs of Labor OR Food Poisoning

Stable Weight or Weight Loss: If you are not me and have thus decided against the post-37-weeks All Cookie Diet, you may find that your weight gain slows, stops, or back-tracks in the final lap. Good for you—why don’t you go try to squeeze into your wedding gown in celebration while I make myself another sandwich.

Restlessness/Energy Burst/Nesting: Another symptom that my inherent laziness has successfully combated for both pregnancies. I do recall a sort of a brain buzz or rush of adrenaline that accompanied the start of early labor with my first, and subconsciously I knew that I had reached the point where mama cats start shredding paper towels in the kitchen and surreptitiously dragging them into the closet to create a birthing bed in the laundry hamper. Building a nest, or watching a lot of HGTV, is our primitive brain’s sign that the show is about to begin.

Increased Bathroom Visits: According to Science, all of the muscles in your body will begin to relax in preparation for the stretching and loosening and accommodating of human skulls that certain parts will soon have to do to deliver your baby. Relaxin is an equal-opportunity hormone, thus your stomach, intestines, and colon will join the party. I would compare this particular style of bodily house-cleaning to what happens when you eat too much Tex-Mex—not terribly aggressive in the way of tainted sushi, but thorough nonetheless.

Losing the Mucus Plug/Bloody Show: Because hemorrhoids and nipple leakage aren’t gross enough, mother nature has prepared this special pregnancy capstone event to usher you into the house of horrors that is labor, delivery, and the post-partum era. In truth, the name is worse than the experience. Your mucus plug may come out over a period of days and thus be easy to confuse with all the other weird ick that’s been emerging from your body since last Easter, or it may come out all at once, appearing like a giant loogey in your toilet. It may be white, pink, or brown, but if it’s bright red or accompanies as much bleeding as your period, call your OB to check in. Bleeding throughout all of the stages of labor is pretty common and usually normal, but it’s one of those “better to be safe” symptoms.

Water Breaking: According to Dr. Internet, only about 15% of women experience their water breaking before labor is well underway, but among my circle of friends, about 95% of them experience this one-way ticket to the L&D fast-lane. Your water may break in a huge splash like in the movies, or it may come in a slow, uncontrollable trickle, the way your pee will be doing for months after birth. Supposedly you can distinguish amniotic fluid from urine by the smell, but I’m not sure who really gets that up close and personal with her underwear this late in the pregnancy game. I was most surprised to learn that your water doesn’t just break once like a water balloon, it may continue gushing during each contraction for hours. If you are having a hospital birth, your water breaking starts the clock on your labor, so clean yourself up, slap on an adult diaper, and get yourself to your OB’s office or L&D within an hour or two.

Contractions: Duh, right? Contractions are the most obvious sign that labor is imminent, but the problem is, no one can tell you what real contractions feel like. Last time around my doctor gave me the whole “5-1-1” rule, meaning I should call when my contractions were five minutes apart, lasting one minute each, for at least one hour. I am such an overachiever I waited until 5-1-2 before triumphantly showing up to the hospital, secretly gloating about my above-average pain tolerance, only to be told I was 1cm dilated and should go back home and wait another week like the rest of the sissies. This time around I will be following the “F-5-5-5” rule, meaning I will go to the hospital when I have said the work “fuck” at least five times in five minutes to five different people. They say that productive contractions grow stronger, more frequent, and more intense over time—but if you’ve been stuck in the purgatory of early labor for days and you just want an IV of narcotics and an Ambien to take the edge off, I recommend bursting into tears at the hospital admissions desk and hoping a nurse takes pity on you.

At the dawn of my third day of strong but irregular contractions with my first child, as I sat in a sleep-deprived haze in the recliner in our living room trying to remember to breathe, I realized that I was never, ever going to have this baby. It simply was not going to happen for me, and I was absolutely certain I would be stuck in that chair, unable to move or speak or sleep or wake up, for all eternity. In that moment, no one could have convinced me that a baby would soon emerge from my body—I had lost all capacity for rational thought. And that was the surest sign of all that active labor had finally begun. As a first-time mom, you won’t know until you know, whether that knowledge sets in before, during, or after labor is underway. So go ahead and do whatever your doctor tells you to do, because maybe you do have an above-average tolerance for pain, and no one wants to give birth in the back seat of her brand new Subaru Outback because she listened to my advice and waited too long to get moving.

As a parent, one of the truest truths is that you will be talking about poop. A lot. In fact, between the first post-partum poop (keep taking those stool softeners) and the 50 shades of baby’s first BM, your life is going to revolve around crap. It’s just how things go.

Before my child was born, I watched the movie “Babies,” a really awesome documentary that everyone should watch before having one of their own, and I was amazed by how the mom in Namibia wiped her baby’s butt with her leg and then her leg with a corn cob (or something other than Pampers Free and Natural wipes). And as I changed diaper after diaper after diaper with my own newborn, I often recalled with gratitude that at least I don’t have to wipe my baby’s butt with my leg and then my leg with a corncob. Well, I sometimes thought of that, and sometimes I just wished there was a magic wand that would get the poop off of everything, especially car seat covers.

This all brings us to the very important topic of diapers. You have almost as many diapering options as there are shades of newborn poop. At my house, we used mostly cloth diapers for the first 4 months, cloth at home and disposables at day care for months 5 and 6, and mostly disposables from month 6 to the present. Based on my experience with cloth-only, hybrid, and disposable-only, I offer my review of some of your poop-containment options:

1. Cloth Diapers: These are good for people who feel guilty about filling up landfills and like doing laundry. They are also awesome for compulsive nesters because you are supposed to wash the cotton ones a bunch of times before your baby is born to get them soft and fluffy and absorbent. Cloth diapers are a pricey initial investment, but can be reused for multiple children, and you can sell them when you’re done. (My husband thought that buying pre-used diapers was too gross, but I bet he won’t mind me selling ours). They also help assuage the guilt you might feel about birthing another pollution machine. If you live somewhere where water is scarce or don’t have your own washing machine, they might not be for you. Some people find that cloth diapers are bulky and they have to go a size up in clothing, but I didn’t experience that. There are several subtypes:

A.Prefolds and covers - If you wore cloth diapers, you probably wore prefolds. The covers have come a long way since your mother’s era. The prefold soaks up the pee and poo, and the PUL (polyurethane laminate) cover attempts to keep it contained. Unlike the rubber covers of your hippie youth, PUL covers are thin, flexible, and waterproof, and they are relatively cheap. If you prefer spending lots of money and have servants who wash your clothes by hand, you can buy wool covers, which are sewn from unicorn hair that absorbs liquid by the gallon and is self-cleaning. The covers come in fun prints and colors. The diapers can be used for burp cloths, changing table pads, and cleaning up spills. If your kid doesn’t get crap on the cover, it can be used more than once before washing. Depending on the size of your baby, you may need pins or a “snappy” fastener to keep the prefold around his waist and legs. YouTube has a plethora of videos online with instructions on getting the most secure fit from a prefold + cover system.

B.All In Ones (AIO) – With AIOs, the cover and the diaper are all attached. You might like these if you like never really getting anything quite 100% clean or dry. Sometimes the absorbent insert is snapped into the cover so the two can be washed separately. Inserts are often made of finicky material like hemp and bamboo that perpetually smells like ammonia. I didn’t like these much at all. And mine leaked. Maybe you’ll have better luck. They also tend to be pricey.

C.Pocket diapers – These are just like they sound. There’s a pocket in the cover where you shove the absorbent insert. Pulling the poop-covered insert out of the pocket afterwards can be gross, but you’re probably going to wash your hands anyway, right? You can use prefolds or “doublers” as inserts, but most pocket diapers come with an insert or two. For nighttime, add an extra insert or doubler (I personally liked the thin, absorbent, but of course, costlier bamboo inserts). These are easy to use, easy to wash and come in even more cute prints. They start at around $5 dollars a diaper for a cheap diaper and can run up to close to $30 a dipe for fancy prints in a fancy name brand with several bamboo inserts. Yes, some diapers cost as much as an entire outfit from Target, but at least most cloth diapers grow with your baby.

Many people, myself included, use some combination of the above, depending on baby’s age and whether you spend most of the day at home, at day-care, or at the grocery store trying to remember if you need milk. Some diapers are “one-size” and have a series of snaps that allow you to use them on babies ranging from 10 to 20+ lbs, and others are sized for more specific weight-ranges. It can be intimidating to start off with cloth diapering, so read a few articles and join a message board or two before you max out your credit card on fleece covers on Etsy only to discover your kid is allergic to synthetics.

2. Disposable diapers: These are good for people who have kids in daycare, don’t have laundry facilities at home, dislike washing poop, or are passionate about filling up landfills with their kid’s shit. While we/I cloth-diapered for the first 6 months, once the kid started eating food and was in daycare, we switched to disposable diapers. They are easier to put on and take off. And there’s no laundry required. Again, there are several choices.

A.Name Brand (Huggies, Luvs, Pampers) - Name brand diapers soak up more pee. That’s all there is to it. Whatever polymersilicadiapergoop they use is amazing. For nighttime dryness, I vote name brand. Shop the sales, find some coupons, or only use them at night to save some dough, but changing your kid (and the sheets) at 2am because you bought the grocery store brand again isn’t fun. I think Huggies smell weird when wet, but you might not. Pampers Ultra Overnight are excellent for heavy nighttime wetters.

B.Store Brand (Target, grocery store, big-box discount store) – Store brand diapers are usually cheaper. I find Target brand to work fine for daytime use with a non-newborn.

C.Fancy Brand (Honest Co, Seventh Generation, Earth’s Best) - These are the diapers that are either eco-friendly or have cute prints or both. They run about 40 to 50 cents a pee/poop. I’m all for reducing use of petrochemicals and plastics, especially next to butts, balls, and vaginas, but remember, for something to biodegrade, it can’t be buried in a landfill…

3. Hybrid diapers: Can’t decide between doing tons of laundry and filling up the landfill? No worries! With a disposable insert and washable cover, these diapers allow you to do both! The best (and worst) of both types.

No matter the type of diaper you decide to go with, there will be a brand that works better for your kid and a brand that doesn’t work as well. These maxims should always hold true:

Don’t stock up on one type of diaper, for that will be the type that makes your child’s butt break out like a acne-plagued teenager with chicken pox.

Three pee-leaks in two days or less means you should go up a size. Don’t focus on the weight recommendations on the package as they are completely made up.

When poop is in your child’s hair, it is probably also on their back and hands.

Car seats give a baby the best angle for pooping.

Car seats are not fully washable.

It’s nice to have so many options for catching our kids’ crap. Some parents even go diaperless and use “elimination communication,” but that’s a different post for a different writer. Whatever you choose or end up using after your first three choices don’t work for you, remember that WIC and SNAP benefits don’t cover diapers. Parents who are struggling to make ends meet often end up reusing disposable diapers or leaving their child in a wet or dirty diaper for longer than they’d like. When you have leftover diapers that are too small for your child or when you’re done using your cloth diapers, consider donating to your local diaper bank or food bank or pantry.

If you have gotten bitten by the cloth diaper (or CD) bug, there are several websites that I liked to browse as I was getting ready for the baby.

Hahahahahahaha! The secret to disciplining a toddler is kept in the same place as the cure for the common cold and that sock you're missing. I hope you didn’t open today’s blog post hoping to find the oracle of knowledge on how to create the perfect toddler. If this post does anything for you, it will let you know that you are not alone in this crazy, toddler-run world. Trying to build a foundation of respect and obedience with a child between the ages of 2 and 22 is like trying to understand why people support Donald Trump running for president—it will drive you to drink and possibly move to Canada.

The toddler years are made especially hard by the crucial milestones that must be achieved, putting pressure on all parties involved. Potty training is one of the messiest and most arduous of these. How do you explain to a 2 year old that it makes more sense to go to the bathroom than it does to continue playing, uninterrupted, until someone else literally cleans up your sh*t? Not a convincing agenda. In short, this is the only advice I can attempt to dole out while I am in the midst of trying to stay afloat myself:

Pick Your Battles: This is easier said than done, but I have found that repeatedly screaming "no" or "stop it" just lands you talking to yourself all day and desensitizes your kid to those words. For example, I allow my toddler to eat a stolen apple in the grocery store in exchange for her sitting quietly in the buggy while we shop. In my defense, Whole Foods does allow your kid an apple while you shop . . . or at least mine has let us get away with it thus far. My guess about the long term effects of this behavior is that she will always get hungry upon entering the grocery store, so worst case is that I'm simply creating a very polite over-shopper.

Be Consistent: I feel like I am living in the movie “Ground Hog Day,” except my mistakes are not erased at the end of each day but the lessons I have tried to bestow on my offspring are completely forgotten. Your kid has an uncanny ability to completely delete any of the guiding principles that you so carefully laid out for them the day before. Explaining why we don’t throw food at the table or put peanut butter in the dog’s hair feels like a total waste of energy. After the 500th time asking my daughter not to put toys in the toilet, I had to ask myself, "are we teaching them or are they teaching us"? Did she really learn not to put peanut butter in the dog’s hair or did I simply learn to put the peanut butter on a higher shelf? Probably a bit of both. After 10,000 hours of this, one of us will be an expert at something.

Don't Show Your Weakness: The moment your toddler sees you looking overwhelmed, they will rip your heart out with a spoon. Do your best to keep it together and save your break downs for your showers. The only thing worse than an irrational toddler meltdown is an adult joining them. Stock your wine cabinet and power through as best you can for the next 36-48 months. This too shall pass.

Don't Get Divorced: Just as hard as it is trying to figure out whether the kid's behavior calls for a time out, a suspension of all activities, or a deep sigh with a look of disappointment, is making sure that you and the person currently assigned to co-parent (husband, wife, aunt, uncle, Whole Foods check-out lady, etc) are on the same page about which disciplinary action should be taken at any given time. This dance can get downright dirty and turn into a scene out of The Clockwork Orange. Before you decide that you would rather be a single parent, remember that your teammate is just trying to figure out how to survive as well.

In closing, I leave you with this quote: “Remember, the race is long and your toddler has more energy and a greater ability to act irrationally in almost every situation that will challenge and degrade your sanity at every turn.” In other words, we’re screwed.

For every list available on the internet of essential baby gear items that you absolutely must have to survive early parenthood, there are parallel lists of items that you do not need. All of these lists include a wipe warmer, presumably because babies don’t really care if their hineys are cold, and also because wipe warmers frequently catch fire. But some lists are far more subjective—I recently came across one that insisted you do not need to buy a crib, because obviously junior will be sleeping beside you until he is two years old and ready for his own straw pallet in the barn. Like most aspects of parenting, learning what you do and do not need to make life a little easier occurs through trial and error. One person’s Sleep Sheep is another person’s Peepee Teepee, and who are any of us to judge the talismans another holds dear when trying to extend her baby’s wake-up time from 4:45am to 4:55am because those ten minutes actually are the difference between giving a passable presentation at her quarterly sales meeting and falling asleep at a red light with her eyes open and remaining that way until somebody calls the police because they assume she is dead.

That said, I do think there are some things that you can wait to buy until after your baby is born and you have an actual test subject to experiment on, or items for which you should retain the receipt or return for store credit if received as a gift. With the tremendous depth of experience provided by having had one child for well over two years, I offer the following list of items you should hold off on buying/unpackaging until your baby’s unique personality reveals itself and you discover he’s either an agreeable little angel with a textbook growth curve or a cantankerous malcontent with chronic diarrhea:

1) Newborn-Size Diapers/Clothes + Size-Up Clothes: I disagree with the recommendation that you should not buy ANY clothes in NB size, but don’t necessarily rip the tags off every single teensy-tiny three-piece newborn outfit you receive at your baby shower. I fully expected to follow family tradition and give birth to a 10-pound baby who could sit up on his own at two months supported purely by fat rolls, but my son was 7 lbs at birth, plus he dropped a few ounces during his colostrum fast and did not end up gaining weight like an off-season high school wrestler, so we needed some NB size clothes and diapers, but not a huge stockpile. He went on to experience seemingly random growth spurts and plateaus throughout his first two years, the former generally occurring within hours of me returning from the Carter’s outlet, thus buying clothes even 3 months ahead was risky. It’s nice to have a little stash of outfits in multiple sizes that you’ll use regardless of season, like cotton sleepers, but I would not recommend going nuts on Zulily’s summer smocking sale in November until you’re well into toddler sizes.

2) Adorable Bibs and Burp Cloths: Daddy’s Lil’ Linebacker, Mommy’s Perfect Gentleman, Property of Grandma, I Poop on Michigan (go Buckeyes)—there’s nothing cuter to compliment the perfect Babies R Us outfit than a pristine cotton bib, lined in gingham and embroidered with love. Except if your newborn actually requires a bib due to reflux, Baby’s First Christmas will be permanently stained with chunky yellow crust that smells like rotten milk, as will everything else both you and he are wearing, sitting on, and standing near, because those adorable bibs are worthless when it comes to actual absorbency. Before baby is born, buy a few packs of cheap terry cloth bibs, and if you discover you have birthed a tiny fire hydrant of stomach acid, I recommend Maxi Moo Moo bibs or something similar with a snap collar (Velcro doesn’t survive the multiple daily washes) and an interior plastic lining. Same goes for burp cloths—skip the 12 square-inches of organic pima cotton printed with duckies and lambies and hearts that won’t even protect your left pinky finger from the volcanic uprising created by two tablespoons of breastmilk and your newborn’s untested digestive system, and instead invest in a pile of cheap, dark colored towels from Wal-Mart, plus a commercial painter’s drop cloth and possibly a few sets of surgical scrubs to save your furniture and your nursing tops. (Even for non-refluxy babies, regular cotton burp cloths are pretty pointless, but cotton prefold cloth diapers, when properly prepped, are excellent alternatives).

3) Receiving Blankets: Blankets of all shapes and sizes and materials are handy and cute and make great backgrounds for your monthly Facebook photo updates, but you do not need to buy these yourself, because I swear that 90% of the gifts you receive after the baby arrives will be blankets. People love buying baby blankets—it’s like we all secretly long to be swaddled in pastel velvet. If you live in the South, people will go so far as to monogram them for you, meaning your firstborn will always be properly identified when blanketed with love and your second child will begin developing her inferiority complex from birth.

4) Special Swaddle Blankets: By these I mean the wide variety of blankets that are cut in certain shapes and offer a variety of fastening devices intended to make it easier for you to swaddle your irate little banshee at 4am rather than screaming at your spouse that only an inbred moron would take this long to locate the diagram in The Happiest Baby on the Block that you clearly bookmarked in your 34th week of pregnancy after you both spent an afternoon practicing the “five Ss” on your neighbor’s dachshund. There is nothing wrong with any one of these blankets, but your particular infant may only respond to a certain type of swaddle, such as one that allows him to suck on his hands, like this; or he may emerge from the womb like a mini Houdini capable of busting out of titanium Velcro and thus require snaps; or he may be like my kid and defy God and nature by despising the swaddle entirely, preferring instead the warm embrace of a sleep-sack dampened with his mother’s exhausted tears. Since any one of these swaddle-saviors runs from $15 to $40, it doesn’t hurt to put a few different kinds on your registry and let your wealthier friends buy them for you, but hold onto the receipts and check store return policies so you can trade them in for whichever type of straitjacket your genetic miracle ultimately prefers.

5) Breastfeeding/Pump Supplies & Accessories: Go ahead and order your breast pump through your insurance company well before your due date (if allowed, some insurance companies require you to wait), and keep in mind that many HSA or FSA accounts can be used for breastfeeding and pumping supplies, but don’t go hog wild and fill your hall linen closet with tubes of lanolin and self-adhesive breast pads like you intend to breastfeed through the zombie apocalypse. Many women with the most ambitious goals find that they are unable to breastfeed, or that it simply isn’t right for them or their baby, or that their baby finds sucking on a nipple smeared in lanolin about as delectable as you would find pouring petroleum jelly on your breakfast cereal.The same goes for milk freezer bags and pump wipes and sterilization kits—put down the Amazon app and go settle your nesting crazy by folding a few tiny hats or smelling another pile of freshly laundered onesies. All of these accessories can be valuable tools in your blissful journey through cracked nipples and overactive let-down, but they will still be there in the warehouse in Chattanooga, primed for same-day delivery, once the actual need arises.

6) Bottles & Nipples & Sippy Cups: It turns out that babies can be as picky about what type of bottle and nipple they prefer as your asshole brother-in-law is about craft beer. You think the set of BPA-free Dr. Brown’s 4-ounce bottles with the Level 1 even-flow nipple are the cat’s meow because that’s what all the experienced moms on your birth-month Facebook group recommended, but your 6 week-old gags and sputters when you try to feed him like you’ve secretly exchanged his Hops Valley Hoppity Hopster IPA for Miller Lite. Sometimes finding the right bottle and nipple takes a few tries. Same goes for sippy cups, so as brilliant as it might seem to have your child’s entire life through college paid for by your mom’s quilting circle via your shower registry, it’s best not to test the upper limits of Target’s return policy on 16 Munchkin Click-Locks once you discover that your toddler only does Nuby Super Spout.

7) Baby Swing/Mamaroo: Another good item to register for so other people pay for it, but again, save the receipt and check the limit on returns. Some parents swear by these contraptions, others find they are the first baby item to be sold over the neighborhood listserv. My son was born savvy enough to tell the difference between my loving, mind-numbingly exhausted embrace and a motorized negligence machine, thus I never used one, but I know plenty of people who worship at the altar of the baby swing for its soothing and sleep-giving powers. If I had a dollar for every baby swing that was ordered on Amazon Prime in a fit of desperation between the hours of midnight and 5am, I would probably be able to afford a Mamaroo.

Even though your pregnancy books and apps all tell you that the 3rd trimester does not begin until Week 28, you go ahead and start counting yourself as “in the homestretch” around week 26 when you grow tired of telling people you have three months to go and watching them try to suppress their horror because when they asked your due date, they were certain you were going to say “next week!” given that you look a bit like a dairy cow wearing an empire-waist shirt. Whatever, you’ll be considered full term in 12 weeks, and what does counting ahead a week or two really matter? It’s not a race. There are no medals for absolute accuracy. You’re pretty sure you ovulated a few days early that month anyway. Jeez.

Stage 2 - Anger (Weeks 28-30):

You have to go to the doctor every two weeks now and wait around for 45 minutes just to have someone hold a tape measure to your belly and mumble that you’re “measuring a little big” and maybe should lay off the cream cheese. Your pelvis feels like it’s splitting in half whenever you walk more than a block, your maternity shirts ride up above your protruding belly-button, and after nightly dreams in which you give birth to a two-headed spaghetti squash in the back of an Uber X, you pop awake at 4am and can’t fall back asleep until 25 minutes before your alarm is set to go off. Pregnancy fucking sucks and you are never doing this shit again.

Stage 3 - Bargaining (Weeks 31-33):

Of course you want a healthy, full-term baby born with zero complications…but if maybe you could experience a minor foible, something that is truly nothing but that the medical establishment chooses to handle with an excess of caution to avoid a malpractice lawsuit, just so you would have to be on bed-rest for the next week or maybe three, that would be great. Really not even like *real* bed-rest, more like light bed-rest, like the kind of bed-rest that means you can still go to Target to shop for a cute diaper caddy that matches your pink-and-navy chevron nursery décor, and you can even go for tapas with your best friend for her birthday on Saturday and maybe have half a glass of sangria, but you just can’t do anything strenuous, like empty the dishwasher or go to work, that would be awesome, OK?

Stage 4 - Depression (Weeks 34-36):

Your toddler has brought home a new strain of the Preschool Plague every week for the past month, and the inability to breathe through your nose has moved your 4am wake-up time back to midnight. One of the six slices of that Meat Lover’s Deluxe pizza you ate on Tuesday upset your tummy and aggravated your hemorrhoids, making it hard to sit, stand or walk without audibly swearing at God. Your early morning Googling reveals that Sudafed, Imodium, and Preparation H are all on the list of things that pregnant women might be allowed to take, but probably shouldn’t, because no one has bothered to test to see if they are likely to trigger premature labor or give your baby ADHD. You’re fat, exhausted, and miserable, and the only thing anyone can say to you is, “just wait til the baby arrives,” as if the guaranteed prospect of being more downtrodden and depressed in two months is supposed to magically lift your spirits and send you skipping off to pre-natal yoga classes while singing “Zippity Doo Da” with manic glee. Your husband’s a dick, your friends are all assholes, and you’re going back to bed with a bowl of mac n’ cheese and a bottle of Tums.

Stage 5 - Acceptance (Weeks 37-40):

You have been pregnant forever. You were born this way and this is how it will always be. Even if someone hands you a baby and says it’s your son or daughter, you will remain pregnant with some ethereal being that will kick you in the ribs whenever you bend over to tie your shoes. You have always worn your husband’s gym shorts to the office, and you have never even seen your lady bits. Eating two breakfasts and three lunches is a normal human diet. You start to enjoy the license to make grunting noises when you sit down, and find that 2am is a great time to catch up on your laundry. You’re actually not ready for it to be over yet. Like some sadistic Buddha, Mother Nature will not let that baby come out until you have fully accepted your permanent pregnant status, so go ahead and schedule a pedicure for the weekend after your due date, and maybe plan to take a few vacation days from work so you can enjoy some solo time watching TLC on the couch. The moment you reach gestational nirvana, your mucus plug will fall out and labor will begin. Good luck.

For those of you who have never given birth and are basing the whole experience on how Hollywood portrays childbirth, I thought I’d review a few scenes from famous movies and give you a run down from least to most realistic:

#1 JUNIOR (1994): This one needs no explanation. I couldn’t find a clip of the actual birth, but who needs it? The movie studio heads that approved the making of this film also made "Problem Child"-- enough said. California, this was your Governor :)

#2 LOOK WHO'S TALKING (1989): Bruce Willis does a stellar job narrating the terror of a newborns experience, but Kirstie Alley’s birth canal is shown has the fastest slip and slide in the world AND she gives birth to a 3-month old baby. Pretty special.

#3 MEN IN BLACK (1997): I can imagine this is EXACTLY what vehicular labor is like, but they make it look like Will Smith’s character is the one having the hard time. They don’t even focus on the poor woman/creature popping out the squid!

#4 KNOCKED UP (2007): While Katherine Hegiel’s intensity is pretty spot on, she loses points for the fact that she can still talk and her knees are no where near her ears. I do give mad props for the quick peek at the baby crowning. Too many movies deny where babies actually come out of during these scenes

#5: ALIEN (1979): This one not only displays how out of control you feel, but the sheer panic that everyone around you is in. They even know there’s a human coming out of you and that this is the most natural thing on earth, but they still stare at you as if E.T. could burst out of you at any moment.

As my child crests the two year mark, much of the gear I considered essential to his early days of life is collecting dust in the basement. The Rock n Play, once one of the first non-human things I would rescue in a fire (after the wedding album, but before the cat), is now wrapped in a garbage bag and wedged between a stack of broken suitcases and a combo TV/VCR. The car-seat canopy and Bjorn are packed away in a plastic bin, the Ergo has been lying on the floor of my station wagon for months, and even the BOB Revolution spends more time in the car port experimenting with new types of mold growth than treating a neighborhood arts festival like a monster truck rally. Yet one device has remained in consistent use since C was about 10 weeks old, shepherding us through growth spurts and illnesses and nap regressions like our own personal Eckhart Tolle of childhood sleep—our Motorola Digital Baby Monitor 3.5 Video MBP36.

Back in the days of yore when little Gen X’ers ran in packs through their cul-de-sacs, playing on trampolines, accepting candy from strangers, preparing their own genetically modified, high-fructose-corn-syrup-based dinners in the microwave and putting themselves to bed after Arsenio, parents didn’t have wireless video monitors with infrared screens and two-way microphones to assess whether their babies were asleep. At best they had primitive one-way walkie-talkies, which made up for what they lacked in features with impressive range, allowing parents to maintain a watchful ear over their offspring while getting uproariously drunk on their neighbor’s back deck. Nowadays, however, a parent without a video monitor might as well be family-bedding in a yurt in Montana five hundred miles from the nearest Trader Joe’s. At its heart, the video monitor is truly the foundation for modern parenting. After all, if you do not begin keeping tabs on how many times your infant rolls from back to front between midnight and 6AM now, how will you ever have the energy and lack of boundaries to secretly rewrite his college admissions essays for him when he’s eighteen?

Despite my own inclination to want to raise my children in an airbrushed version of the 1980s (yes to playing outdoors ‘til the sun goes down, no to neon Jams and trickle-down economics), I found that using a video monitor has helped me foster my son’s good sleeping habits and thus overall independence. My husband and I were never pushed to the necessary point of sleep-deprived delirium to implement a true Cry-It-Out method of sleep training, however we did start letting our son “fuss it out” beginning around 12 weeks of age, once we had established a consistent bedtime routine. Having the video monitor helped me determine whether he was truly red-faced crying like he’d been laid down to rest beside an active volcano or whether he was just rolling around squawking and griping like my great-uncle watching the 2008 Democratic presidential debates. The former required immediate intervention, a figurative hitting of the re-set button, whereas the latter meant that he was on track to be asleep within five minutes and it was time to unscrew the wine. As a frazzled first-time parent with the ability to spiral into a black hole of guilt for putting my beloved firstborn in his bouncer seat on the bathroom floor so I could pee lest he feel the slightest twinge of abandonment, the visual confirmation that fussing and whining was simply a part of his self-soothing mechanism provided tremendous comfort until the wine could take effect.

Additional features also contribute to the video monitor’s overall utility. Most of them now have night vision, so you can see whether your baby’s eyes are open or not, which is helpful when they begin to exhibit that adorable habit of “sleep-crying” at 90-minute intervals throughout the night at around 4 months of age (this is part of the dreadful 4-month sleep regression, and it too shall pass). The two-way microphone has been an invaluable contribution to scaring the crap out of my toddler every time he starts to climb out of his crib during naptime, even if it does guarantee that one day he’ll be telling his therapist about the omniscient, disembodied voice that ruled over his childhood and always seemed to have old episodes of Friday Night Lights playing in the background.

As all parents will learn, infant and toddler sleep is not a one-and-done kind of deal. Brag all you want about your six week-old sleeping 12 hours a night, but unless you have sold your soul to the Devil (and I wouldn’t blame you, and send me his email address if you have it), you are likely to encounter a few hiccups over the next few years, and by hiccups I mean that government mandated form of parental torture known as daylight savings time. Sleep habits evolve, regressions occur, new problems arise. Our parents’ generation may have gotten by just fine not knowing if that weird gurgling noise they heard coming from the baby’s room was the peaceful coo of their sleeping cherub or the onset of another round of rotavirus, but they were also allowed to drink martinis while breastfeeding and paid their teenage baby-sitters $1.50 an hour, so you know, we deserve our breaks where we can get them.

*As for specific video monitor brands, I don’t have any glowing recommendations. The 2013 version of the Motorola has crappy battery life and the power cord has become really loose at the point of connection with the receiver and thus falls out all the time and is impossible to reconnect in the dark, but it has survived over two years of being tossed about by a small child (and occasionally a grown adult who is exasperated by her infant son’s gift of six straight nights of “reverse cycling” to thank her for going back to work), so I should probably give it some credit. Let me know if you have an amazing video monitor you recommend, and then send it to me along with a second camera for the upcoming new addition and I promise to write a glowing review.

Written by: Kathleen

Without a video monitor, we never would have known that our child sleeps sitting up like an old man on the subway.